Fifth Avenue eBook

cabin, to his unaccustomed eyes, seemed about as long
as the Burlington Arcade. From the deck of this
packet he first viewed Hell’s Gate, the Hog’s
Back, the Frying Pan, and other notorious localities
attractive to readers of the Diedrich Knickerbocker
History. When, later, Dickens left New York for
Philadelphia, he wrote of the journey as being made
by railroad and two ferries, and occupying between
five and six hours.

The ten years that separated the first visit of Dickens
and the first visit of Thackeray had wrought many
changes. Thackeray, too, came to New York from
Boston, but in his case it was the matter of one unbroken
train journey, in the course of which he reread the
“Shabby Genteel Story” of a dozen years
before. Dickens’s transatlantic trip had
consumed nineteen days. The “Canada,”
which carried Thackeray, made the crossing in thirteen.
In New York Thackeray stayed at the Clarendon Hotel,
on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Eighteenth Street;
but his favourite haunt in the city was the third
home of the Century, in Clinton Place. Though
not in the least given to flattery or over-effusiveness
in his comments on Americans and American institutions,
Thackeray wrote and spoke of the Century as “the
best and most comfortable club in the world.”

CHAPTER II

The Stretch of Tradition

Stretches of the Avenue—­The Stretch of
Tradition—­Washington Arch—­Old
Homes and Gardens—­The Mews and MacDougal
Alley—­In the Fourth Decade—­A
Genial Ruffian of the Olden Time—­Sailor’s
Snug Harbor—­The Miss Green
School—­Andrew H. Green, John Fiske, John
Bigelow, Elihu Root, and
Others as Teachers—­The Brevoort Farm—­The
First Hotel of the Avenue—­A
Romance of 1840—­“Both Sides of the
Avenue.”

A snug little farm was the
old Brevoort
Where cabbages grew of the
choicest sort;
Full-headed, and generous,
ample and fat,
In a queenly way on their
stems they sat,
And there was boast of their
genuine breed,
For from old Utrecht had come
their seed.
—­Gideon
Tucker, “The Old Brevoort Farm."

Passing under the Washington Arch, the march up the
Avenue properly begins. To commemorate the centenary
of the inauguration of the nation’s first President
a temporary arch was erected in the spring of 1889.
The original structure reached from corner to corner
across Fifth Avenue, opposite the Park, and the expense
was borne by Mr. William Rhinelander Stewart and other
residents of Washington Square. It added so much
to the beauty of the entrance to the Avenue that steps
were taken to make it permanent, and the present Arch
was the result of popular subscription. One hundred
and twenty-eight thousand dollars was the cost of
the structure, which was designed by Stanford White.
Comparatively recent additions to the Arch are the
two sculptured groups on northern facade, to the right
and left of the span. They are the work of H.A.
MacNeil.